Author David Kirkpatrick at Common Wealth Club California meet traces the story of the most powerful social networking tool of our day from its humble beginnings to its role as an international phenomenon. He is in conversation with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.

Recently, Edge.org  invited Evgeny Morozov (blog | twitter) and Clay Shirky (blog | twitter), to sit down for a debate on the subjects of dictators, democracy, Twitter revolutionaries, and the role of the Internet and social software in political lives of people living under authoritarian regimes.

The dreams of network utopians vs. the realists. Is the Internet is a medium of emancipation and of revolution — or a tool of control and repression? Did Twitter and Facebook have stoke the flames of rebellion in Iran, or did they help the authorities unmask the rebels? — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

There is certainly a lot of excitement within governments — both democratic and authoritarian ones — about using the Internet to advance their political agendas, both at home and abroad. The kind of assumptions that politicians need in order to decide their policies all have to come from somewhere. And much of what has been said about the Internet in the past seems intellectually invalid today.
— Evgeny Morozov

The Burmese example of communications use during their political struggle, followed by panicked shutdown, or the Ukrainian example from the Orange Revolution, or the successful Moldovan protests of last year, suggest to me that conditions under which a public that can self-identify and self-synchronize, even among a relatively small elite, is in fact a threat to the state. … This is one of the things I want to understand about your videos, because while you and I are not polar opposites, we obviously have very different points of view about this. Do you believe that the synchronizing effect among a politically engaged public is (a) possible, and, (b) political, and if it is, what should the U.S. reaction to that be?
— Clay Shirky

On social networks like Facebook even if you have kept your profile very very private, people can just look at your friends list and get lots of vital information about you. Most of the social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn allow people to see your pic and friends list as part of the open access for visitors. In a study “You Are Who You Know:Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks” [PDF], conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems an algorithm was tested that could accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users by simply looking at their friend lists. The results show that certain user attributes can be inferred with high accuracy when given information on as little as 20% of the users.

[ Via Erik Hayden on Miller McCune and also cross-posted on Slashdot]